Health and Education eBook

In the burning summer of 1566 Rondeletius went a long
journey to Toulouse, seemingly upon an errand of charity,
to settle some law affairs for his relations.
The sanitary state of the southern cities is bad
enough still. It must have been horrible in those
days of barbarism and misrule. Dysentery was
epidemic at Toulouse then, and Rondelet took it.
He knew from the first that he should die. He
was worn out, it is said, by over-exertion; by sorrow
for the miseries of the land; by fruitless struggles
to keep the peace, and to strive for moderation in
days when men were all immoderate. But he rode
away a day’s journey—­he took two
days over it, so weak he was—­in the blazing
July sun, to a friend’s sick wife at Realmont,
and there took to his bed, and died a good man’s
death. The details of his death and last illness
were written and published by his cousin Claude Formy;
and well worth reading they are to any man who wishes
to know how to die. Rondelet would have no tidings
of his illness sent to Montpellier. He was happy,
he said, in dying away from the tears of his household,
and “safe from insult.” He dreaded,
one may suppose, lest priests and friars should force
their way to his bedside, and try to extort some recantation
from the great savant, the honour and glory of their
city. So they sent for no priest to Realmont:
but round his bed a knot of Calvinist gentlemen and
ministers read the Scriptures, and sang David’s
psalms, and prayed; and Rondelet prayed with them through
long agonies, and so went home to God.

The Benedictine monk-historian of Languedoc, in all
his voluminous folios, never mentions, as far as I
can find, Rondelet’s existence. Why should
he? The man was only a druggist’s son and
a heretic, who healed diseases, and collected plants,
and wrote a book on fish. But the learned men
of Montpellier, and of all Europe, had a very different
opinion of him. His body was buried at Realmont:
but before the schools of Toulouse they set up a white
marble slab, and an inscription thereon setting forth
his learning and his virtues; and epitaphs on him were
composed by the learned throughout Europe, not only
in French and Latin, but in Greek, Hebrew, and even
Chaldee.

So lived and so died a noble man; more noble—­to
my mind—­than many a victorious warrior,
or successful statesman, or canonised saint.
To know facts, and to heal diseases, were the two
objects of his life. For them he toiled, as
few men have toiled; and he died in harness, at his
work—­the best death any man can die.

VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST

I cannot begin a sketch of the life of this great
man better than by trying to describe a scene so picturesque,
so tragic in the eyes of those who are wont to mourn
over human follies, so comic in the eyes of those
who prefer to laugh over them, that the reader will
not be likely to forget either it or the actors in
it.